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A counterfeit civilisation for the world
- starting in the cradle of civilisation, Iraq
'And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet' Matthew 24:6
Most recent additions
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-944831,00.html
December 28, 2003
Nicholas Rufford
THE Secret Intelligence Service has run an operation to gain public support for sanctions and the use of military force in Iraq. The government yesterday confirmed that MI6 had organised Operation Mass Appeal, a campaign to plant stories in the media about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.
The revelation will create embarrassing questions for Tony Blair in the run-up to the publication of the report by Lord Hutton into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly, the government weapons expert.
A senior official admitted that MI6 had been at the heart of a campaign launched in the late 1990s to spread information about Saddam’s development of nerve agents and other weapons, but denied that it had planted misinformation. “There were things about Saddam’s regime and his weapons that the public needed to know,” said the official.
The admission followed claims by Scott Ritter, who led 14 inspection missions in Iraq, that MI6 had recruited him in 1997 to help with the propaganda effort. He described meetings where the senior officer and at least two other MI6 staff had discussed ways to manipulate intelligence material.
“The aim was to convince the public that Iraq was a far greater threat than it actually was,” Ritter said last week.
He said there was evidence that MI6 continued to use similar propaganda tactics up to the invasion of Iraq earlier this year. “Stories ran in the media about secret underground facilities in Iraq and ongoing programmes (to produce weapons of mass destruction),” said Ritter. “They were sourced to western intelligence and all of them were garbage.”
Kelly, himself a former United Nations weapons inspector and colleague of Ritter, might also have been used by MI6 to pass information to the media. “Kelly was a known and government-approved conduit with the media,” said Ritter.
Hutton’s report is expected to deliver a verdict next month on whether intelligence was misused in order to promote the case for going to war. Hutton heard evidence that Kelly was authorised by the Foreign Office to speak to journalists on Iraq. Kelly was in close touch with the “Rockingham cell”, a group of weapons experts that received MI6 intelligence.
Blair justified his backing for sanctions and for the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that intelligence reports showed Saddam was working to acquire chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The use of MI6 as a “back channel” for promoting the government’s policies on Iraq was never discovered during the Hutton inquiry and is likely to cause considerable disquiet among MPs.
A key figure in Operation Mass Appeal was Sir Derek Plumbly, then director of the Middle East department at the Foreign Office and now Britain’s ambassador to Egypt. Plumbly worked closely with MI6 to help to promote Britain’s Middle East policy.
The campaign was judged to be having a successful effect on public opinion. MI6 passed on intelligence that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction and rebuilding its arsenal.
Poland, India and South Africa were initially chosen as targets for the campaign because they were non-aligned UN countries not supporting the British and US position on sanctions. At the time, in 1997, Poland was also a member of the UN security council.
Ritter was a willing accomplice to the alleged propaganda effort when first approached by MI6’s station chief in New York. He obtained approval to co-operate from Richard Butler, then executive chairman of the UN Special Commission on Iraq Disarmament.
Ritter met MI6 to discuss Operation Mass Appeal at a lunch in London in June 1998 at which two men and a woman from MI6 were present. The Sunday Times is prevented by the Official Secrets Act from publishing their names.
Ritter had previously met the MI6 officer at Vauxhall Cross, the service’s London headquarters. He asked Ritter for information on Iraq that could be planted in newspapers in India, Poland and South Africa from where it would “feed back” to Britain and America.
Ritter opposed the Iraq war but this is the first time that he has named members of British intelligence as being involved in a propaganda campaign. He said he had decided to “name names” because he was frustrated at “an official cover-up” and the “misuse of intelligence”.
“What MI6 was determined to do by the selective use of intelligence was to give the impression that Saddam still had WMDs or was making them and thereby legitimise sanctions and military action against Iraq,” he said.
Recent reports suggest America has all but abandoned hopes of finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that David Kay, head of the Iraq Survey Group, has resigned earlier than expected, frustrated that his resources have been diverted to tracking down insurgents.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-944831,00.html
The following should be viewed more as a preview than a review - or even more accurately as a ‘sales-pitch’, because it is essential reading if one is to gain a clearer understanding of America’s rôle on the global scene. Elections are an essential (even an inherent) element of democracy - provided the former are conducted in a fair and open manner. It would now seem that this indisputable fact has for years been ignored by that ‘Epitome of Democracy’, America, and hidden behind a veil of secrecy nurtured by a media under corporate control - until the publication in 1992 of the book “Votescam: The Stealing of America”, which was immediately banned by the major book chains, who listed the book as ‘out of print’ and actively worked to prevent its sale. The veil of secrecy prevailed. The co-authors of this book were (they died in the nineties), James (Jim) and Kenneth (Ken) Collier, two entrepreneural brothers who, from 1970 onwards carried out a comprehensive examination of the American voting system, resulting in their book, which exposed, in detail, corporate America’s manipulation of the voting system over a number of decades. In the immediate aftermath of George W. Bush’s election victory of 2000, the American journalist, Greg Palast (of the ‘Observer’) exposed - clearly - how the crucial State of Florida had rigged the vote. The public’s reaction to this - in non-American countries - was one of shock, tinged with a certain disbelief, understandably. In America, the veil of secrecy prevailed, at least initially - thus confirming the effectiveness of the control of the media noted above (and as will be noted in slightly more detail below). It is patently obvious that (a) such control could only have been of a corporate nature- it could only have come from ‘on high’; and (b) an American journalist, such as Palast, could only have been able to ‘blow the whistle’ from afar. That he did so is proof of his courage - and one can only assume that the fact that in his book “The Best That Democracy Can Buy” he makes no mention of the previous decades of the Collier’s investigation into the subject confirms the efficiency of that “veil of secrecy’. But the fact remains: votescamming had been practised for decades in that country.
(NB: All following text within “double-quotes” is taken from the book, ‘Votescam’)
In August 1964 News Election Service (NES), a consortium of the three major television networks: ABC, NBC and CBS, plus the Associated Press wire service, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post and other news-gathering organizations - was created to compile computer-voting results and feed them to the major media. (It is of crucial importance to note here that this was in the immediate aftermath of the JFK assassination.)
As unearthed by the Collier bros. from the Library of Congress: in 1980, a study was commissioned by the CIA-linked Air Command and Staff College in cooperation with the University of New Mexico to examine the US electoral system. This was subsequently distributed to selected government agencies. Following are some of its findings: "The United States government has no elections office and does not attempt to administer congressional elections.” “The responsibility for the administration of elections and certification of winners in the United States national election rests with a consortium of private entities, including 111,000 members of the national League of Women Voters.” “The formal structure of election administration in the United States is not capable of providing the major TV networks with timely results of the presidential and congressional elections. In the case of counting actual ballots on national election night, public officials have abdicated responsibility of aggregation of election night vote totals to a private organization, News Election Service of New York (NES)... This private organization performs without a contract: without supervision by public officials. It makes decisions concerning its duties according to its own criteria.” (underlining by this reviewer) “The question and accountability of News Election Service has not arisen in the nation's press because the responsibility NES now has in counting the nation's votes was assumed gradually over a lengthy period without ever being evaluated as an item on the public agenda. This privately owned vote counting cartel (NES) uses the vast membership of the network-subsidized League of Women Voters as field personnel whose exclusive job is to phone in unofficial vote totals to NES on election night.” ( It is worthy of note that the NEC is now known as the Voter News Service [VNS]).
It would seem that these findings would account for the subsequent unexpected victory of George Bush snr. (ex-CIA Director) over his fellow-Republican candidate, Sen. Robert Dole, in the New Hampshire primary in 1988 - to say nothing of his subsequent victory over the Democrat, Dukakis, for the presidency. To refer back to the New Hampshire primary for a closer look at how the voting system was manipulated: The Govermor of New Hampshire at the time was John Sununu, a computer engineer: “Nothing was said in the press about the secretly programmed computer chips inside the ‘Shouptronic’ Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines in Manchester, the state's largest city.”.. 1. “The ‘Shouptronic’ was purchased directly from a company whose owner, Ransom Shoup, had been twice convicted of vote fraud in Philadelphia.” 2. “It bristled with telephone lines that made it possible for instructions from the outside to be telephoned into the machine without anyone's clear knowledge.” 3. “It completely lacked an ‘audit trail,’ an independent record that could be checked in case the machine ‘broke down’ or its results were challenged.” 4. “Roy G. Saltman, of the federal Institute for Computer Sciences and Technology, called the Shouptronic ‘much more risky’ than any other computerized tabulation system because ‘You are fundamentally required to accept the logical operation of the machine, there is no way to do an independent check.’” “A source close to Gov. Sununu insists that Sununu knew from his perspective as a politician, and his expertise as a computer engineer, that the Shouptronic was prime for tampering. The concept is clear, simple and it works. Computerized voting gives the power of selection, without fear of discovery, to whomever controls the computer.” On becoming president, Bush appointed Sununu Chief of Staff in his administration.
It is self-evident that, some 12 years later, Bush seniors’ sons, George W., and Jeb, ‘got the message’ (see Palast above).
“It became possible, with fast counters developed by International Business Machine Corporation, to use punch cards, with rows of small, rectangular holes, as ballots. These old cards could be counted at the rate of thousands per minute by an IBM sorting machine hooked up with a photoelectric cell and a computerized tabulator.... after several years, IBM realized that the Vote-amatic voting machine... was actually a Pandora's box.... IBM eventually sold its rights in the company after IBM's president, Thomas Watson, read an article that implied he might be trying to install IBM voting machines in enough precincts to win him the first electronically rigged election for President of the United States.”... “During a little-publicized court trial in West Virginia, it was revealed that there were ways to stop the computers during a count, while everyone watched. Simply fiddle with a few switches, turn the computer back on again, and thereby alter the entire vote, or parts of it. If anyone asked questions, the fixers could make any number of plausible excuses. Mostly all they had to say was ‘just checking that everything's running okay,’ and that was satisfactory.” “With voting machines attached to telephone lines it was possible to meddle with the actual vote from a telephone miles away. Getting caught was not possible. ‘Deniability’ and ‘untrackability’ were built into the secret source codes that animated the machines.”.... “Most Americans did not realize that such an anti-democratic virus had infected their vote. Most do not realize it today.”
In 1970, the younger of the 2 brothers, Ken, decided to run for Congress, as a Democrat, against the sitting Republican Claude Pepper, (who, incidentally, sat on the board of the bank which had foreclosed on the lease held by the brothers’ company, ‘Thee Image’). Their fascinating, detailed account of the election campaign - with all its conspiratorial machinations - has to be read to be appreciated. Suffice it to say that they lost - but, by god, they learnt a lot! Examples of this (not comprehensive by any means) follow: “We drove up to the state capitol at Tallahassee... From the Secretary of State's office we got the final vote totals for every candidate in the three elections held in Dade County in 1970. We copied them and brought them back home. The first thing we did was to lay out the Tallahassee sheets on the pool table and divide them into piles. September primary, October runoff and November final election. Then we arranged the television readouts in time sequence in order to compare the numbers that the state eventually registered as official against the projections from the television stations. We checked the totals in the Governor's race and found that an aggregate of 141,000 votes were cast on September 8th. Then we checked the runoff election held a month later and the exact same figure — 141,000 votes were cast again! ‘How is that possible?’ Ken asked, and then he answered himself, ‘It isn't. The losing candidates dropped out of the race, and whenever that happens the vote drops, too. So we checked the final election in November and found once again that 141,000 votes were cast in the Governor's race. In hockey they call that a hat trick. In politics we call it a fix.’” “Ken was already looking for the figures on the Senate race. ‘It was a five-person contest in the primary and 122,000 votes were cast in total,’ he said. ‘Look at this! There's 122,000 votes cast in the runoff, and...’ he flipped the sheets to the finals. ‘Well, what do you know... 122,000. Jim picked up the cue stick and smashed the white ball into the rack. He was angry and yet he marvelled at the sheer audacity of the scheme He pointed the cue at Ken. ‘Do you think the Secretary of State is involved? ‘Hell, what about the press?’ Ken threw back. ‘If the press knew these numbers and never questioned them, then they're either stupid or collaborators.’”
Enough said: from now on, let the book speak for itself......
http://www.votescam.com/orderbook.html
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00065.htm
According to election industry officials, electronic voting systems are absolutely secure, because they are protected by passwords and tamperproof audit logs. But the passwords can easily be bypassed, and in fact the audit logs can be altered. Worse, the votes can be changed without anyone knowing, even the County Election Supervisor who runs the election system.
The computer programs that tell electronic voting machines how to record and tally votes are allowed to be held as "trade secrets." Can citizen's groups examine them? No. The companies that make these machines insist that their mechanisms are a proprietary secret. Can citizen's groups, or even election officials, audit their accuracy? Not at all, with touch screens, and rarely, with optical scans, because most state laws mandate that optical scan paper ballots be run through the machine and then sealed into a box, never to be counted unless there is a court order. Even in recounts, the ballots are just run through the machine again. Nowadays, all we look at is the machine tally.
Therefore, when I found that Diebold Election Systems had been storing 40,000 of its files on an open web site, an obscure site, never revealed to public interest groups, but generally known among election industry insiders, and available to any hacker with a laptop, I looked at the files. Having a so-called security-conscious voting machine manufacturer store sensitive files on an unprotected public web site, allowing anonymous access, was bad enough, but when I saw what was in the files my hair turned gray. Really. It did.
The contents of these files amounted to a virtual handbook for vote-tampering: They contained diagrams of remote communications setups, passwords, encryption keys, source code, user manuals, testing protocols, and simulators, as well as files loaded with votes and voting machine software.
Diebold Elections Systems AccuVote systems use software called "GEMS," and this system is used in 37 states. The voting system works like this:
Voters vote at the precinct, running their ballot through an optical scan, or entering their vote on a touch screen.
After the polls close, poll workers transmit the votes that have been accumulated to the county office. They do this by modem.
At the county office, there is a "host computer" with a program on it called GEMS. GEMS receives the incoming votes and stores them in a vote ledger. But in the files we examined, which were created by Diebold employees and/or county officials, we learned that the Diebold program used another set of books with a copy of what is in vote ledger 1. And at the same time, it made yet a third vote ledger with another copy.
Apparently, the Elections Supervisor never sees these three sets of books. All she sees is the reports she can run: Election summary (totals, county wide) or a detail report (totals for each precinct). She has no way of knowing that her GEMS program is using multiple sets of books, because the GEMS interface draws its data from an Access database, which is hidden. And here is what is quite odd: On the programs we tested, the Election summary (totals, county wide) come from the vote ledger 2 instead of vote ledger 1, and ledger 2 can be altered so it may or may not match ledger 1.
Now, think of it like this: You want the report to add up only the actual votes. But, unbeknownst to the election supervisor, votes can be added and subtracted from vote ledger 2. Official reports come from vote ledger 2, which has been disengaged from vote ledger 1. If one asks for a detailed report for some precincts, though, the report comes from vote ledger 1. Therefore, if you keep the correct votes in vote ledger 1, a spot check of detailed precincts (even if you compare voter- verified paper ballots) will always be correct.
And what is vote ledger 3 for? For now, we are calling it the "Lord Only Knows" vote ledger.
If Libya can do it, why not Israel?
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/columnist/story/0,9321,1111670,00.html
There's a logic to these things. Muammar
Gadafy, growing older, and his isolated Libya, growing poorer, were getting
nothing worthwhile from the atomic bomb they hadn't built yet or chemicals
they had scant residual use for. Logic - and common sense - meant changing
tack. Good for logic. But logic doesn't stop there.
What next? If weapons of mass destruction are a menace in unstable regions such as the Middle East, if their availability must be reduced, then logic begins to move us closer to the confrontation we never seek with the nuclear power we - let alone Messrs Bush and Blair - seldom mention: Israel.
Nobody, including the Knesset, quite knows what happens inside the Dimona complex, but if you put together a compote of usually reliable sources (the Federation of American Scientists, Jane's Intelligence Review, the Stockholm Institute), a tolerably clear picture emerges. Ariel Sharon probably has more than 200 nuclear warheads this morning - more if the 17 years since Mordechai Vanunu's kidnapping have been devoted to building stockpiles.
That makes Israel the world's fifth largest nuclear power, boasting more bangs from Washington's bucks than Blair's Britain. And over in the other WMD basket, nobody much dissents when a report by the office of technology assessment for the US Congress concludes that Israel has "undeclared offensive chemical warfare capabilities" and is "generally reported as having an undeclared offensive biological warfare programme". Bombs, missiles, delivery systems, gases, germs? Tel Aviv has the lot. We only forget to remember because it's not a suitable subject for polite diplomatic conversation.
Logic, in the old days,
didn't trouble too much about that. It saw a state of Israel surrounded by
many potential foes who denied its right to exist. It saw such enemies initiate
research of their own. It saw too many wars, bitterly fought. It watched
the Soviet Union, with warheads to spare, cruising continually in these troubled
waters. It was prepared to turn a blind eye and to button its lip.
Come back today for a reality check, though. Saddam's Iraq is a wrecked rat trap. The weapons of mass destruction Gadafy sought are no more, no threat. Yemen, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt? Nothing to say, nothing to show. You can, if you wish, be concerned about Syria's chemical weapons facilities - and you can reasonably worry about a nuclear Iran, even though Tehran took a decisive step back towards international acceptability last week. But Moscow is out of the action, and the whole dynamic of Middle East danger has changed. Logic comes knocking at Sharon's door.
He faces problems, of course: problems of intractable politics
and Palestinian suicide bombers. But he can't nuke Gaza or gas Bethlehem.
His WMD are useless in any battle for hearts and minds - as practically useless
as Gadafy has just deemed them to be. So why keep Dimona and the biological
research centre at Nes Ziona out of any equation? Why pretend that they don't
exist?
The formal logic of defence is threat, counter-threat. Sit in Tehran and look east - at China, India and Pakistan, with their bombs; look west, and there sits Israel. It is natural, in logic, that Iran consider its own deterrent. It will require a deal of understanding engagement - and guarantees - to close off that path. But such guarantees are possible in the age of the world's only superpower. There is every reason to talk frankly about Israel's bomb, just as the Syrians could be closely involved in dismantling chemical stockpiles if only we could find the right language to start.
What, after all, is the current western fear? Of terrorism, rogue states, of more 9/11s. That's why Geoff Hoon's latest defence review moves out of heavy tanks and battleships. It adjusts to what it calls the new realities of flexibility and intelligence. Even Gadafy seems to have noticed. Why not mention them to Sharon?
An Israel bristling with nuclear hardware
it cannot talk about and chemical horrors it could negotiate away does not
make itself, or the world, any safer. On the contrary, it makes a hypocritical
farce of too much Washington bargaining, buries too many initiatives deep
down Hypocrisy Gulch and gives rogue groupings in ex-rogue states every reason
to carry on developing, stealing or buying the devices that keep Mr Blair
awake at night.
Does Tel Aviv see that connection? Does it want to bring a whole region in from the cold? Such things are becoming possible. But first we need the honesty to follow where logic leads; and begin to talk about them.
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/columnist/story/0,9321,1111670,00.html
p.preston@guardian.co.uk
http://www.vanunu.freeserve.co.uk/
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/primetime/DailyNews/FBI_whistleblowers021219.html
By Brian Ross and Vic Walter
Dec. 19 — Two veteran FBI investigators say they were ordered to stop investigations into a suspected terror cell linked to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network and the Sept. 11 attacks.
In a dramatic interview with ABCNEWS, FBI special agents and partners Robert Wright and John Vincent say they were called off criminal investigations of suspected terrorists tied to the deadly bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa. U.S. officials say al Qaeda was responsible for the embassy attacks and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.
"September the 11th is a direct result of the incompetence of the FBI's International Terrorism Unit. No doubt about that. Absolutely no doubt about that," Wright said. "You can't know the things I know and not go public."
In the mid-1990s, with growing terrorism in the Middle East, the two Chicago-based agents were assigned to track a connection to Chicago, a suspected terrorist cell that would later lead them to a link with Osama bin Laden. Wright says that when he pressed for authorization to open a criminal investigation into the money trail, his supervisor stopped him.
"Do you know what his response was? 'I think it's just better to let sleeping dogs lie,'" said Wright. "Those dogs weren't sleeping. They were training. They were getting ready."
The FBI says its handling of the matter was appropriate at the time.
"Truthfully, if 9/11 had not occurred, we wouldn't be here [giving the interview]," said Vincent, a 27-year veteran at the bureau until he retired a few days after being interviewed by ABCNEWS. "Because of 9/11, we're here because we see the danger."
The suspected terrorist cell in Chicago was the basis of the investigation, yet Wright, who remains with the FBI, says he soon discovered that all the FBI intelligence division wanted him to do was to follow suspected terrorists and file reports — but make no arrests.
"The supervisor who was there from headquarters was right straight across from me and started yelling at me: 'You will not open criminal investigations. I forbid any of you. You will not open criminal investigations against any of these intelligence subjects,'" Wright said.
Even though they were on a terrorism task force and said they had proof of criminal activity, Wright said he was told not to pursue the matter.
In 1998 al Qaeda terrorists bombed two American embassies in Africa. The agents say some of the money for the attacks led back to the people they had been tracking in Chicago and to a powerful Saudi Arabian businessman, Yassin al-Kadi. Al-Kadi is one of 12 Saudi businessmen suspected of funneling millions of dollars to al Qaeda and who had extensive business and financial ties in Chicago.
Yet, even after the bombings, Wright said FBI headquarters wanted no arrests.
"Two months after the embassies are hit in Africa, they wanted to shut down the criminal investigation," said Wright. "They wanted to kill it."
The move outraged Chicago federal prosecutor Mark Flessner, who was assigned to the case despite efforts Wright and Vincent say were made by superiors to block the probe. Flessner said Wright and Vincent were helping him build a strong criminal case against al-Kadi and others.
"There were powers bigger than I was in the Justice Department and within the FBI that simply were not going to let it [the building of a criminal case] happen. And it didn't happen, " Flessner said.
He said he still couldn't figure out why Washington stopped the case — whether it was Saudi influence or bureaucratic ineptitude.
"I think there were very serious mistakes made," said Flessner. "And I think, it perhaps cost, it cost people their lives ultimately."
Perhaps most astounding of the many mistakes, according to Flessner and an affidavit filed by Wright, is how an FBI agent named Gamal Abdel-Hafiz seriously damaged the investigation. Wright says Abdel-Hafiz, who is Muslim, refused to secretly record one of al-Kadi's suspected associates, who was also Muslim. Wright says Abdel-Hafiz told him, Vincent and other agents that "a Muslim doesn't record another Muslim."
"He wouldn't have any problems interviewing or recording somebody who wasn't a Muslim, but he could never record another Muslim," said Vincent.
Wright said he "was floored" by Abdel-Hafiz's refusal and immediately called the FBI headquarters. Their reaction surprised him even more: "The supervisor from headquarters says, 'Well, you have to understand where he's coming from, Bob.' I said no, no, no, no, no. I understand where I'm coming from," said Wright. "We both took the same damn oath to defend this country against all enemies foreign and domestic, and he just said no? No way in hell."
Far from being reprimanded, Abdel-Hafiz was promoted to one of the FBI's most important anti-terrorism posts, the American Embassy in Saudi Arabia, to handle investigations for the FBI in that Muslim country.
The FBI said it was unaware of the allegations against the Muslim agent when he was sent to Saudi Arabia or of two similar incidents described to ABCNEWS by agents in New York and Tampa, Fla. They said Abdel-Hafiz contributed significantly to many successful terror investigations.
In a statement to ABCNEWS, the FBI also defended the agent, saying he had a right to refuse because the undercover recording was supposed to take place in a mosque.
But former prosecutor Flessner said that was a lie and the mosque was never part of the plan.
"What he [Abdel-Hafiz] said was, it was against his religion to record another Muslim. I was dumbfounded by that response," said Flessner. "And I had perfectly appropriate conversations with the supervisors of his home office and nothing came of it."
On Sept. 11, 2001, the two agents watched the terror attacks in horror, worried that men they could have stopped years earlier may have been involved.
The White House confirmed their fears. One month after the attacks, the U.S. government officially identified al-Kadi — the same man the FBI had ordered Wright and Vincent to leave alone years earlier — as one of bin Laden's important financiers.
Al-Kadi told ABCNEWS he can prove his total innocence, repeatedly denying, from his office in Riyadh, any connection to bin Laden or al Qaeda. "Not even one cent went to Osama bin Laden," he said.
But on Dec. 6, U.S. Customs agents, as part of their own investigation, conducted a midnight search of a Boston-area company believed to be secretly owned and controlled by al-Kadi.
The company provides computer software to the FBI and other key federal agencies, which means al-Kadi and his employees could have had access to some of the government's most sensitive secrets.
Al-Kadi is on the U.S. government's "dirty dozen" list of leading terror financiers being investigated by the CIA. The federal government says it is pursuing possible criminal charges.
"I was relieved that Customs was picking it up … where we failed big time," said Wright. "There's so much more. God, there's so much more. A lot more."
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/primetime/DailyNews/FBI_whistleblowers021219.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1103566,00.html
Ian Traynor Wednesday December 10, 2003 The Guardian
Private corporations have penetrated western warfare so deeply that they are now the second biggest contributor to coalition forces in Iraq after the Pentagon, a Guardian investigation has established.
While the official coalition figures list the British as the second largest contingent with around 9,900 troops, they are narrowly outnumbered by the 10,000 private military contractors now on the ground.
The investigation has also discovered that the proportion of contracted security personnel in the firing line is 10 times greater than during the first Gulf war. In 1991, for every private contractor, there were about 100 servicemen and women; now there are 10.
The private sector is so firmly embedded in combat, occupation and peacekeeping duties that the phenomenon may have reached the point of no return: the US military would struggle to wage war without it.
While reliable figures are difficult to come by and governmental accounting and monitoring of the contracts are notoriously shoddy, the US army estimates that of the $87bn (£50.2bn) earmarked this year for the broader Iraqi campaign, including central Asia and Afghanistan, one third of that, nearly $30bn, will be spent on contracts to private companies.
The myriad military and security companies thriving on this largesse are at the sharp end of a revolution in military affairs that is taking us into unknown territory - the partial privatisation of war.
"This is a trend that is growing and Iraq is the high point of the trend," said Peter Singer, a security analyst at Washington's Brookings Institution. "This is a sea change in the way we prosecute warfare. There are historical parallels, but we haven't seen them for 250 years."
When America launched its invasion in March, the battleships in the Gulf were manned by US navy personnel. But alongside them sat civilians from four companies operating some of the world's most sophisticated weapons systems.
When the unmanned Predator drones, the Global Hawks, and the B-2 stealth bombers went into action, their weapons systems, too, were operated and maintained by non-military personnel working for private companies.
The private sector is even more deeply involved in the war's aftermath. A US company has the lucrative contracts to train the new Iraqi army, another to recruit and train an Iraqi police force.
But this is a field in which British companies dominate, with nearly half of the dozen or so private firms in Iraq coming from the UK.
The big British player in Iraq is Global Risk International, based in Hampton, Middlesex. It is supplying hired Gurkhas, Fijian paramilitaries and, it is believed, ex-SAS veterans, to guard the Baghdad headquarters of Paul Bremer, the US overlord, according to analysts.
It is a trend that has been growing worldwide since the end of the cold war, a booming business which entails replacing soldiers wherever possible with highly paid civilians and hired guns not subject to standard military disciplinary procedures.
The biggest US military base built since Vietnam, Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, was constructed and continues to be serviced by private contractors. At Tuzla in northern Bosnia, headquarters for US peacekeepers, everything that can be farmed out to private businesses has been. The bill so far runs to more than $5bn. The contracts include those to the US company ITT, which supplies the armed guards, overwhelmingly US private citizens, at US installations.
In Israel, a US company supplies the security for American diplomats, a very risky business. In Colombia, a US company flies the planes destroying the coca plantations and the helicopter gunships protecting them, in what some would characterise as a small undeclared war.
In Kabul, a US company provides the bodyguards to try to save President Hamid Karzai from assassination, raising questions over whether they are combatants in a deepening conflict with emboldened Taliban insurgents.
And in the small town of Hadzici west of Sarajevo, a military compound houses the latest computer technology, the war games simulations challenging the Bosnian army's brightest young officers.
Crucial to transforming what was an improvised militia desperately fighting for survival into a modern army fit eventually to join Nato, the army computer centre was established by US officers who structured, trained, and armed the Bosnian military. The Americans accomplished a similar mission in Croatia and are carrying out the same job in Macedonia.
The input from the US military has been so important that the US experts can credibly claim to have tipped the military balance in a region ravaged by four wars in a decade. But the American officers, including several four-star generals, are retired, not serving. They work, at least directly, not for the US government, but for a private company, Military Professional Resources Inc.
"In the Balkans MPRI are playing an incredibly critical role. The balance of power in the region was altered by a private company. That's one measure of the sea change," said Mr Singer, the author of a recent book on the subject, Corporate Warriors.
The surge in the use of private companies should not be confused with the traditional use of mercenaries in armed conflicts. The use of mercenaries is outlawed by the Geneva conventions, but no one is accusing the Pentagon, while awarding more than 3,000 contracts to private companies over the past decade, of violating the laws of war.
The Pentagon will "pursue additional opportunities to outsource and privatise", the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, pledged last year and military analysts expect him to try to cut a further 200,000 jobs in the armed forces.
It is this kind of "downsizing" that has fed the growth of the military private sector.
Since the end of the cold war it is reckoned that six million servicemen have been thrown on to the employment market with little to peddle but their fighting and military skills. The US military is 60% the size of a decade ago, the Soviet collapse wrecked the colossal Red Army, the East German military melted away, the end of apartheid destroyed the white officer class in South Africa. The British armed forces, notes Mr Singer, are at their smallest since the Napoleonic wars.
The booming private sector has soaked up much of this manpower and expertise.
It also enables the Americans, in particular, to wage wars by proxy and without the kind of congressional and media oversight to which conventional deployments are subject.
From the level of the street or the trenches to the rarefied corridors of strategic analysis and policy-making, however, the problems surfacing are immense and complex.
One senior British officer complains that his driver was recently approached and offered a fortune to move to a "rather dodgy outfit". Ex-SAS veterans in Iraq can charge up to $1,000 a day.
"There's an explosion of these companies attracting our servicemen financially," said Rear Admiral Hugh Edleston, a Royal Navy officer who is just completing three years as chief military adviser to the international administration running Bosnia.
He said that outside agencies were sometimes better placed to provide training and resources. "But you should never mix serving military with security operations. You need to be absolutely clear on the division between the military and the paramilitary."
"If these things weren't privatised, uniformed men would have to do it and that draws down your strength," said another senior retired officer engaged in the private sector. But he warned: "There is a slight risk that things can get out of hand and these companies become small armies themselves."
And in Baghdad or Bogota, Kabul or Tuzla, there are armed company employees effectively licensed to kill. On the job, say guarding a peacekeepers' compound in Tuzla, the civilian employees are subject to the same rules of engagement as foreign troops.
But if an American GI draws and uses his weapon in an off-duty bar brawl, he will be subject to the US judicial military code. If an American guard employed by the US company ITT in Tuzla does the same, he answers to Bosnian law. By definition these companies are frequently operating in "failed states" where national law is notional. The risk is the employees can literally get away with murder.
Or lesser, but appalling crimes. Dyncorp, for example, a Pentagon favourite, has the contract worth tens of millions of dollars to train an Iraqi police force. It also won the contracts to train the Bosnian police and was implicated in a grim sex slavery scandal, with its employees accused of rape and the buying and selling of girls as young as 12. A number of employees were fired, but never prosecuted. The only court cases to result involved the two whistleblowers who exposed the episode and were sacked.
"Dyncorp should never have been awarded the Iraqi police contract," said Madeleine Rees, the chief UN human rights officer in Sarajevo.
Of the two court cases, one US police officer working for Dyncorp in Bosnia, Kathryn Bolkovac, won her suit for wrongful dismissal. The other involving a mechanic, Ben Johnston, was settled out of court. Mr Johnston's suit against Dyncorp charged that he "witnessed co-workers and supervisors literally buying and selling women for their own personal enjoyment, and employees would brag about the various ages and talents of the individual slaves they had purchased".
There are other formidable problems surfacing in what is uncharted territory - issues of loyalty, accountability, ideology, and national interest. By definition, a private military company is in Iraq or Bosnia not to pursue US, UN, or EU policy, but to make money.
The growing clout of the military services corporations raises questions about an insidious, longer-term impact on governments' planning, strategy and decision-taking.
Mr Singer argues that for the first time in the history of the modern nation state, governments are surrendering one of the essential and defining attributes of statehood, the state's monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
But for those on the receiving end, there seems scant alternative.
"I had some problems with some of the American generals," said Enes Becirbasic, a Bosnian military official who managed the Bosnian side of the MPRI projects to build and arm a Bosnian army. "It's a conflict of interest. I represent our national interest, but they're businessmen. I would have preferred direct cooperation with state organisations like Nato or the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. But we had no choice. We had to use MPRI."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1103566,00.html
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1101752,00.html
As a wave of arrests strikes fear into Britain's Islamic community, Martin Bright reveals how the feuding generations are being driven apart
Sunday December 7, 2003 The Observer
The shots slammed into a row of Asian businesses on Dudley High Street early last Tuesday. The town's Muslim Association was the first to be hit, then a Kashmiri jeweller's and an Asian barber's. The backlash had begun.
At the beginning of last week, Usman Choudhary and Umar Ijaz, two devout young men from the long-established and traditionally peaceful Kashmiri community, were rounded up in a nationwide anti-terrorist sweep that saw 21 people taken into custody. A third Dudley man, who has yet to be identified, was arrested in nearby Walsall, with a man from Luton. The four are suspected of conspiring in a substantial credit-card fraud, and anti-terrorist officers are investigating links to the funding of extremist groups. So far no charges have been brought against them, and their families and friends deny any wrongdoing.
As the news broke of the arrests, the reaction from the local white community was swift. Apart from the shooting incident, cars in the streets where the two men lived were trashed and police set up extra patrols around their homes and mosques.
The arrests were a devastating blow for the older generation of Muslims in Dudley, who have gained a reputation for moderation and taking a stand against terrorism. After the attacks of 11 September 2001, the Dudley Muslim Association was one of the first in the country to condemn the attacks and, on the two anniversaries since, it has organised a memorial event for the victims.
One of the men arrested, 23-year-old Choudhary, is the son of the chairman of the central mosque. This close-knit community has been torn apart. People here are painfully aware that they are just a mile away from Tipton, the home of two young men caught fighting for the Taliban and detained by the US in Guantanamo Bay.
The suggestion that the Black Country is harbouring terrorists has deeply wounded this community. Khurshid Ahmed, head of the Dudley Muslim Association, said years of work to encourage Muslims in the West Midlands into the mainstream had been jeopardised: 'We have been at the forefront of the war against terrorism. We have helped gather intelligence to root out dangerous elements. But because the chair of the mosque committee's son was arrested, that somehow tars the whole community.'
The shock waves of last week's anti-terrorism raids are still resonating. Even Muslim leaders who have worked closely with the police and the Home Office to root out extremism have been surprised by the scale of the arrests. So far, only two have been charged with terrorist offences, including Sajid Badat of Gloucester, who has been charged with conspiring with shoe bomber Richard Reid. Four Algerians arrested in Eastbourne under terrorist legislation have been charged with fraud and in Cambridge two women were released and then rearrested on immigration charges.
The arrests are part of a police strategy of disruption reported by The Observer last year, aimed at dismantling terror networks, even when there was little hard evidence of criminal activity.
But Dr Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, of the Muslim Parliament, said the arrests threatened to alienate Muslims further and people were deeply cynical about the reasons for the arrests. 'People believe this is just a cover-up for failure in Iraq. It is playing on xenophobia to persuade people there is a fifth column in this country and show that something is being done.'
In Dudley, the Muslim elders feel under siege. They perceive a threat from the police, an increasingly hostile media, local thugs and the British National Party, which has fed on fears of Islam to recruit in the area. But perhaps more seriously, there is a growing realisation that the community is also under threat from within - radical puritanical strains of the religion imported from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are a particular concern, as are extremist groups such as al-Muhajiroun (the Emigrants) and Hizb-ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation), which recruit at colleges and universities. There are fears that young activists are being drawn away from the more moderate interpretation of Islam fostered by their parents' generation.
Ahmed is also chair of the British Pakistani Association and a commissioner at the Commission for Racial Equality. As well-placed as anyone to identify the problems facing British Muslims, he says they now have to acknowledge that a small but growing number of young Muslims are turning to extreme forms of Islam.
'Radicalisation is extremely serious and something we have to blame ourselves for,' says Ahmed. 'The leadership has not been effective in dealing with young people. We have left them to the mercy of extremist groups who have preyed on them at colleges and universities.'
There is no doubt that a small minority of radical young Muslims have been politicised by the countless conflicts in the Islamic world: Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya and Kashmir all have the ability to provoke deep passions. Many of Britain's mosques quite legitimately raise large sums of money for charities and aid organisations working in these conflict zones.
But the increase in radicalism has other causes much closer to home. Dudley's 7,000 Muslims are the largest ethnic minority in the area, but they also have the highest levels of unemployment, illiteracy and are over-represented in the local crime figures. Those young Muslims who manage to fight their way out of these desperate conditions to get an education face further frustration - according to Ahmed, young Muslim graduates are eight times less likely to find a job than their white counterparts. Over-educated and underemployed young men: the classic breeding ground for Islamic radicalism. The pattern is replicated across the country.
Disbelief surrounds the arrest of Choudhary and Ijaz. Both were known as highly religious young men, but they mixed well with less devout Muslims and were both thought to be good cricketers. Ghulam Choudhary said he was 'heartbroken' by the arrest of his son and remains convinced of his innocence, He told The Observer: 'His only crime is to be a religious Muslim, if that is a crime. I'm sure he is not involved with any extreme organisation.'
Nabeel Shabir, 19, whose father's jewellery shop was hit in the shootings, said few people believed the men were terrorists: 'They prayed five times a day. You always saw them at the mosque. But we never expected anything like this. We have never seen such scenes in all our lives.'
It is perhaps significant that Choudhary and Ijaz chose not worship at the mainstream, westernised Dudley Central Mosque, but instead at the more orthodox Queens Cross Masjid at the other end of town. This mosque follows the puritan Ahl-i Hadith sect, which grew up in nineteenth-century India to take Islam back to its roots in reaction to British imperialism.
Police have made clear there is no link between the mosque and the crimes being investigated in Dudley. There is no suggestion that the mosque's imams are preaching anything other than peace. But it may be a sign of a growing generation gap that these young men chose a more austere and orthodox sect to their parents. The imam of the mosque, Mohammed Abdullah, moved here two years ago from Saudi Arabia and speaks little English. He is part of a growing number of imams imported from Saudi religious universities to meet the demand in Britain's mosques.
Via a translator, Abdullah told The Observer that terrorism and suicide were outlawed by Islam. 'If one person is killed, the whole of humanity suffers,' he said. But Home Office and Foreign Office ministers have expressed concern that figures such as Abdullah fail to understand the complex pressures facing young British Muslims when preaching their orthodox message.
Chief Superintendent Dennis Hodson of West Midlands Police described the arrests as 'deeply unfortunate' and should not be connected to any of the town's mosques. 'These police inquiries have to continue. But whatever happens, we need to reassure Dudley's Muslims and the wider community. We can understand people being fearful, but the Muslims must not become scapegoats. This applies here, but also to the rest of the country when these kinds of sensitive arrests are made.'
Elsewhere in the town, tension was raised during anti-war demonstrations when a small minority of Muslim youths shouted their support for Saddam Hussein. In the Litten Tree pub in Dudley Town centre, Norman Povey and Andy Johnson said rumours were rife that mosques had been raided in the area. 'I have Muslim mates and we have a laugh and even a drink together. But it's the younger ones who are the problem,' said Povey. 'And when you hear them shouting "Saddam, Saddam", I do think something should be done.'
There are signs of hope. Around the walls of Ahmed's office are full-colour plans for the grandly named Pride of Dudley Project - a vast £5 million hilltop mosque to rival the only other major landmark in this down-at-heel Black Country town: the crumbling ruins of its eleventh-century castle, home to the earls of Dudley.
The project was conceived, in part, as a response to 11 September as a gift to the town, with a 'community and enterprise centre' for Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
Perhaps controversially for some Muslims, the mosque has been designed with cathedral-like windows as a tribute to the Christian influences on Islam. The mosque will celebrate Christmas as well as Muslim festivals.
'It is meant to be a celebration of our heritage and Christianity and Judaism are part of that heritage. We believe this will be the first mosque in the world to have half-Christian and half-Muslim architecture. We are very proud of that,' said Ahmed.
But when Ahmed took plans of the mosque to be framed, the shop manager said: 'I used to envy and admire your community because your children were so much better behaved. But when we see kids from your community fighting in Afghanistan or in Guantanamo, we wonder how safe we are.'
Ahmed knows it is such doubts that fuel the deep anti-Muslim feeling emerging in Britain. 'It is understandable that people have these fears and it is up to us to reassure them about our young people.'
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1101752,00.html
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1101744,00.html
Muslims accuse 'heavy-handed' police as nearly everyone arrested is freed
Antony Barnett and Martin Bright Sunday December 7, 2003 The Observer
Only five of the 529 people arrested in Britain as terrorist suspects since the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 have been convicted of any terrorist crime.
The vast majority of those detained were British Muslims, and most were released without charge.
The Muslim community claims there is a danger of all its members being criminalised, and says the figures prove the police are being too heavy-handed in enforcing the Terrorism Act.
More than 20 people have been arrested under the Act in the last fortnight, including Sajid Badat, from Gloucester, who was charged with conspiring to cause an explosion.
The Home Office argues that the arrests across the UK have been necessary to prevent a major terrorist attack on this country.
There have been successes. Baghdad Meziane and Brahim Benmerzouga, from Leicester, were each jailed for 11 years last April after being convicted of raising funds for terrorists.
Yet it is far more common for arrests to be accompanied by high-profile press coverage, and for the suspects to be quietly released later, or detained on lesser charges, such as immigration or passport offences.
One example is Karim Kadouri, who was arrested in November 2002 for allegedly plotting to release poison gas in the London Underground. All terrorism charges against him were dropped, and he was jailed for four months last February for having a fake passport.
Two members of a radical Islamic group alleged to have planned to use ricin in a chemical weapons attack on a high-profile London target were never charged with terrorist offences. Instead, the brothers involved in the alleged plot, Samir and Mouloud Feddag, were jailed for possessing false passports.
The most highly-publicised case of false claims levelled against a terrorist suspect were those against Algerian pilot Lotfi Raissi who was alleged by the US security forces to have trained the pilots involved in the 11 September attacks.
He was released without charge after spending five months in Belmarsh high-security prison in south London, although he did not face any charge under British law.
Another man, Sulayman Zainulabidi, was cleared last year of trying to recruit terrorists on a website he ran from his south London home.
Inayat Bunglawala, a spokesman of the Muslim Council of Britain, said: 'There is massive publicity given to arrests of so-called Islamic terrorists, giving the impression that there are Islamic cells all round the country.
'The vast majority of these are released without any charges, but the damage is already done. Politicians are too quick to make public pronouncements before they have seen the evidence.'
A spokesman for the Home Office defended the arrest record, arguing that the statistics gave a misleading picture.
'A number of people arrested under the Terrorism Act have been convicted under other related laws such as firearm offences,' he said. 'We believe the Act allows the police to carry out their vital role in targeting suspected terrorist activities and preventing an attack.'
Additional reporting by Tenali Heikka
Source: Minority Rights Group International
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1101744,00.html
The ousting of Eduard Shevardnadze from office in November 2003 has resulted in revelations, many of which are of a highly ironic nature as will be appreciated as the story unfolds.
Keep in mind the following facts: (a) Shevardnadze had "ruled Georgia for 12 years after playing an instrumental role in the final days of the Soviet bloc" [1] ; (b) Georgia has been a member of NATO's 'Partnership for Peace' (PfP) Pro-gramme since 1994; (c) "The US is providing military assistance to Georgia in the form of training and equipment, which has already cost the US government about USD 70 million. US instructors have already trained three battalions of commando units, a total of 1750 people... US military instructors have finished training 550 Georgian commando units...and, in the words of Shevardnadze 'Georgian forces are now approaching NATO standards.'" [2] ; (d) Shevardnadze had at all times offered his full support to the US on its foreign policy - including the invasion of Iraq; and (e) above all, he had willingly cooperated with the oil companies in their Caspian projects (with not a little help from his old friend, James Baker III, legal rep.of the Azerbaijan International Oil Co.).
On the face of it, it would seem puzzlingly ironic that America would have allowed Shevardnadze to be removed from office. This, therefore, calls for a closer look at matters/events which, because of their pertinence, may help solve the puzzle.
In late 2000, Shevardnadze invited George Soros - whom he had known since the 80's - to Tbilisi to set up the Open Society Georgia (an offshoot of Soros's Open Society Institute), 'with the stated aim of building democratic institutions and civil society.' On that trip, Soros met Shevardnadze's Justice Minister, Mikhail Saakashvili - who some months later, and now disillusioned with Shevardnadze - quit the government & went into opposition. This initial trip by Soros was to be followed by several other visits, though his relationship with Mr. Shevardnadze had begun to sour, as evinced by Soros's statement to a news conference in Moscow in 2002 on the subject of the coming Georgia election in 2003: "It is necessary to mobilize civil society in order to assure free and fair elections because there are many forces that are determined to falsify or to prevent the elections being free and fair," Mr. Soros said, adding that "This is what we did in Slovakia at the time of [Vladimir] Meciar, in Croatia at the time of [Franjo] Tudjman, and in Yugoslavia at the time of Milosevic." In February 2003, Giga Bokeria, a Georgian activist who had founded the 'Liberty Instititute' in opposition to Shevardnadze, was sent to Serbia to learn how the Serbian resistance movement , OTPOR, had brought about the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic. This resulted in a trip to Georgia the following summer by an OTPOR group "who ran three-day courses teaching more than 1,000 students how to stage a peaceful revolution." This was all funded by Soros's Open Society Institute. [3] (Soros's dealings throughout the Balkans are in the public domain - well-covered elsewhere)
Mikhail Saakashvili was a name that would subsequently 'hit-the-headlines' come November 2003, when Shevardnadze was deposed. After all, as leader of the United National Movement and chairman of the Tbilisi City Council, he had led the rebellion. Intriguingly, in April 2003, he had been invited to attend a 'discussion' chaired by the Nixon Center in Washington. This was a group founded by Nixon on "January 20, 1994 (the 25th anniversary of his first inauguration and just three months before his death in April of that year) as a forward-looking, activist institution designed not just to study and talk, but also to make a difference in shaping U.S. foreign policy perspectives for the 21st century."..."The Center is funded through a combination of corporate and individual donations in addition to foundation grants."... "In March 1995, the Center was quickly established as a leading participant in the debate over American foreign policy by its highly successful national policy conference 'After Victory: Defining an American Role in an Uncertain World.' The conference addressed fundamental questions about U.S. goals and interests in the post-Cold War era and featured major presentations by President Bill Clinton, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Dr. Henry Kissinger, who served as conference chairman.".....To further emphasise the preeminence of this Center, the following is a list of its more famous/infamous board members:
Honorary Chairman: Henry A. Kissinger (Former Secretary of State, et al.)
Chairman: Maurice R. Greenberg (Chairman and CEO of American International Group)
Conrad M. Black (the Hollinger Group)
John McCain
Brent Scowcroft (ref: Iran-Contra débacle)
Dimitri K. Simes, Center President (Ex Officio) (expert on U.S.-Russian relations and a foreign policy advisor to President Nixon,)
James Schlesinger (former Secretary of Defense)
John Deutch (former Sec. of Defense & CIA Director) [4]
The above-mentioned Center 'discussion' in Washington on April 14 2003 revealed many interesting pointers pertinent to the subject of this article - as the following excerpts will show:
"Mikheil Saakashvili, one of the leading opposition party leaders, argued that President Eduard Shevardnadze has very little support in the country, and added that 'if Washington does not push for free and fair elections in Georgia , there will be chaos on the street.'"
"Mr. Saakashvili sees the main challenge from the populist Labor Party, which recently won a court case against the American electricity utility company, AES. The party promotes free electricity to Georgians and stood firmly against the Iraq war. Mr. Saakashvili argued that the government indirectly supports the Labor Party."
"'Georgian opposition is closely working with the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI) for election monitoring. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (now chairman of NDI) is expected to travel to Tbilisi in June for the first preparatory mission, and again in September', he said."
"Saakashvili referred several times to Serbia in explaining developments in Georgia.... There also has been the formation of peaceful student and opposition movements like the ones that succeeded against the Milosevic government. 'Like in Serbia in 1996, the church can play a huge role in reining in violence because it enjoys moral authority,' he argued. Urging immediate reforms, he said that so far he was a 'successful version of Djindjic.'" - the Serbian prime minister who was subsequently assassinated. [5] (Refer the last paragraph to Soros's activities noted above).
Under the heading 'Georgia's Saakashvili backs oil-pipeline plan', The Seattle Times of November 27 2003 noted: "'All strategic contracts in Georgia, especially the contract for the Caspian pipeline, are a matter of survival for the Georgian state,' said Mikhail Saakashvili, who yesterday was endorsed by the country's interim President Nino Burjanadze in the upcoming presidential election. The decision makes Saakashvili the clear front-runner in the Jan. 4 presidential election."....
"Oil companies BP and Statoil said the ouster of Shevardnadze did not represent any threat to their plans to ferry Azerbaijan's huge oil and gas reserves to Turkey via oil and gas pipelines through Georgia, known as Baku-Ceyhan and Baku-Erzurum."....
"Saakashvili sought to dampen the enormous expectations raised by the former opposition's victory... 'I want to tell every family of Georgia that in three weeks, in two months, extraordinary changes won't happen,' he said."....
Shevardnadze "speculated that forces other than the protesters were involved in his ouster. He noted that the U.S. ambassador to Georgia, Richard Miles, was posted in Yugoslavia before the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic, and suggested the ambassador might have encouraged Georgia's opposition."
The newspaper continued .."Should Saakashvili win, it would make him the most Americanized national leader ever seen in the former Soviet Union outside the Baltic states. Aside from his studies at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., Saakashvili also earned a degree at Columbia Law School. With no money in the budget and $1.8 billion in foreign debt, Saakashvili acknowledged that the interim government cannot pay salaries or pensions until after the elections."
"Washington committed $2.4 million to help conduct Georgia's Nov. 2 election. It was part of a 10-year investment of $1.3 billion aimed at helping Georgia create a civil society. In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the Bush administration was putting together an 'inter-agency mission' to go to Georgia next week to offer help with elections and other areas of cooperation." [6]
The above recorded event bears a striking resemblance to what happened in Yugoslavia - in more ways than one - but the crucial lesson to be drawn from it is that Corporate America will desert an 'ally' at the drop of a hat - if that 'ally' is no longer of tactical use to it on its Global March Onward!...
[1] Seattle Times Nov. 27 '03 (implying a causal linkage between Shevardnadze's close relationship w/James Baker & the fall of the USSR)
[2] http://newsfromrussia.com/world/2003/09/02/49731.html
[3] Mark Mackinnon 'Globe & Mail' Nov. 26th 2003
[4] http://www.nixoncenter.org
[5] http://www.nixoncenter.org/publications/Program%20Briefs/PBrief%202003/041403saakashvili.htm.
[6] Seattle Times op.cit.
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/666/re2.htm
A recent attack on a Knesset member underscores the country's hostility towards calls for transparency in Israel's weapons of mass destruction programme, Jonathan Cook reports
At midday on Friday, 24 October, Issam Makhoul, an Arab member of the Israeli parliament, and his wife Suad got into their two cars outside their home in the centre of Haifa. Issam Makhoul reversed his Knesset-supplied Ford out of the driveway as his wife started the engine of the family Honda to collect their twin children from school.
Seconds later an explosion flooded Suad Makhoul's car with flames. She leapt from the vehicle moments before the fire could engulf her.
Today, Makhoul's house is under a 24-hour guard and he is escorted everywhere in public by an army-trained bodyguard -- of the kind usually accompanying senior government ministers and defence officials.
The Shin Bet security services, who have told Makhoul that the explosion was caused by a small bomb placed under the car, have refused to comment further. There has been almost no coverage in either the Israeli or foreign media, and a Haifa court has issued a gag order on information related to the case.
Makhoul has possibly the lowest profile of the 10 Arab members of the Knesset, most of whom appear readier than Makhoul to make headlines in the Hebrew media by being drawn into verbal, and occasionally physical, combat with right- wing MPs in the chamber.
Makhoul belongs to Jubha, the "quietest" of the Arab factions. The party is contained within the joint Arab and Jewish Communist bloc known as the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, which uniquely puts co-existence between the two main communities at the heart of its political platform.
Other Arab MPs belong to Azmi Bishara's secular nationalist Tajamu Party and the Islamic Movement, whose spiritual leader is Sheikh Raed Salah.
These two have been far more outspoken and as a consequence are the subject of public witch- hunts. Both are now embroiled in criminal trials initiated by Attorney-General Elyakim Rubinstein, apparently at the behest of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
So what thrust the white-haired, mild- mannered Makhoul into a situation in which he was specially targeted for assassination?
According to Israeli Army Radio, Knesset security officials are working on the assumption that criminal elements within the Arab minority were responsible for the attack. That seems far less probable than that the would-be assassins selected Makhoul because he has been an almost solitary critic of Israel's most sensitive -- if widely known -- secret: that it has stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), including nuclear arms.
For decades Israel has refused to confirm the now well-documented fact that it has a significant arsenal of nuclear warheads -- the only country in the Middle East known to have successfully developed such a programme. Estimates suggest it has as many as 300 warheads, some of which, if the latest reports are to be believed, have been fitted to cruise missiles aboard Dolphin submarines, putting every Arab state within range of an Israeli strike.
With the connivance of the West -- in particular the US, Britain, France, Germany and South Africa -- Israel has been allowed to do all this unchecked at its nuclear weapons factory at Dimona in the Negev, and without signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Today it is believed to have nuclear weapons bases at Haifa, Kfar Zechariah, and Eilaboun and Yodfat in the Galilee.
Israel also has an advanced biological weapons programme based at Nes Tsiona, south of Tel Aviv, where it is reported to have been working on new toxins, including a nerve agent that can attack genes found only in Arabs.
Makhoul gained notoriety in February 2000 for trying to cut through Israel's policy of "nuclear ambiguity" -- its refusal publicly to discuss its possession of warheads -- by raising the issue of the country's atomic programme in the Knesset, the first time such a debate had ever been staged. His speech provoked an outpouring of vitriol from Jewish MPs, who accused him of being a traitor and tried to have him ejected from the chamber.
During the stormy debate, Makhoul appealed for the release of Mordechai Vanunu, the scientist turned whistleblower who in 1986 exposed Israel's secret weapons programme at Dimona. Vanunu was later abducted by Mossad agents and has been in prison, much of the time in solitary confinement, ever since.
Makhoul told the other MPs: "Vanunu is not the problem. The problem is the Israeli government's policy. A policy that's turned a small territory into a poisonous nuclear waste bin ... which could make us all disappear in a nuclear cloud."
Most right-wing MPs were not in the chamber to protest: they had stormed out before Makhoul got up to speak. Instead left-wing MPs shouted abuse, including Ophir Pines of Labour who called out: "You are committing a crime against Israeli Arabs today."
Makhoul outraged the Israeli government and the general public again, in June this year, by appearing in the BBC documentary "Israel's Secret Weapon", which examined in detail Israel's record of acquiring WMDs and its concerted effort to intimidate those who try to speak out.
In one scene a series of officials refuse to give an interview to the BBC reporter over the phone, several saying that they do not want to suffer Vanunu's fate. Makhoul, on the other hand, is shown castigating Israel for dragging the region into a nuclear arms race.
The broadcast so angered Israel that it cut all official ties with the BBC, including its reporters; a ban that was only reversed this week after the BBC -- in what was widely seen as an attempt to ingratiate itself with the Sharon government -- agreed to set up a Mideast news ombudsman to ensure the "impartiality" of its reports.
Few Israeli officials are prepared to link the bomb attack with the MP's campaign against the country's nuclear arsenal. The producers of the BBC programme e-mailed Makhoul after the explosion to say they hoped it was not the result of the broadcast.
However, Roman Bronfman, a Haifa member of the Knesset from the Meretz Party who has close contacts with Israel's large Russian community, says he has heard that a group of extreme right-wing Russian students at the Technion technical college in Haifa planted the device. Four groups at the college are believed to have openly opposed Makhoul's nuclear views. Bronfman has handed a list of suspects to the police, though so far no action has been taken.
Sources close to Makhoul, however, believe that the assassination plot cannot be lightly dismissed as the work of fanatics. The police have told the MP that the culprits must have carried out detailed research of his movements before deciding where and when to plant the bomb.
But the size of the bomb, weighing less than one kilogramme, suggests it was meant less to kill and more to send a message -- not the usual tactics of a Jewish terror cell.
The attack also follows a campaign of widespread incitement against Makhoul, which the authorities, including the attorney-general, have done nothing to curb.
Typical was an interview of Makhoul on a Tel Aviv radio talk show with a former right-wing Knesset member, Shmuel Platto Sharon, two weeks after the assassination attempt and close to the anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination by right-wing extremists.
Although ostensibly there to talk about Israel's nuclear policies, Makhoul is interrupted by Sharon who barks at him with the question, "Why do you hate us?", and the statement, "You are dangerous". Later Sharon again interrupts to say, "You have no business being here [in Israel] -- you should go to Palestine." He then adds: "I know your game. You eat Jews. People like you shouldn't stay in this country."
Friends of Makhoul fear that the climate of hatred against him is receiving official sanction. Some of the continuing official hostility towards Makhoul may derive from his determination to create an anti-nuclear campaign inside Israel. He observes: "Israel is the only nuclear state in the world that hasn't developed a 'ban the bomb' movement, either within the peace camp or the green movement. Here uniquely, it seems, the Israeli bomb is seen as a peaceful bomb. Those who call themselves peace activists are really apologists for Israel's continuing nuclear policy."
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/666/re2.htm
By Margareta Pagano
eFinancial News
You can't get much hotter than Jacob Rothschild. Over the past few weeks this doyen of finance and the arts has flown as close to the sun as one can get by stepping into two of the world's most controversial corporate and geo-political hot spots.
He is the new deputy chairman of BskyB where Rupert Murdoch's son, James, has just been elected chief executive, and he was rumoured to be the trustee of shares in Yukos owned by the jailed Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky - reputedly Russia,s richest man. What is so extraordinary is that Lord Rothschild, a rather quiet, highly cultured grandee who has always shunned the public spotlight in his business affairs, should choose now to tread the boards.
Since 1980, when he so famously left the family bank, NM Rothschild, following a row over strategy with his cousin, Sir Evelyn Rothschild, he has pursued a relatively quiet career steering clear of the oxygen of publicity by keeping his interests unquoted. Until BSkyB, Rothschild has sat on the board of only one listed company.
Instead, he spent the past two decades building a series of highly successful companies in insurance, banking and investment including Five Arrows, St James,s Place Capital, which he ran with Sir Mark Weinberg, and J Rothschild Assurance. Today, he runs RIT Capital Partners, an investment management company with a portfolio of £700m ($1bn). His personal fortune is reputed to be £400m.
The great exception to his pursuit of the quiet life came in early 1989, when, with Sir James Goldsmith and Kerry Packer, he created Hoylake to bid for BAT, the tobacco group. He enjoys having invented the notorious 'unbundlin' expression, which was to be used by many an entrepreneur as they went about breaking up monoliths.
So Rothschild,s decision to join the BSkyB board is all the more astonishing. Even people working with him in his office at RIT have been asking why he is doing it.
Close friends are equally mystified. Perhaps he likes to surprise, to do the unpredictable, just as he has done through his friendship with the jailed Khodorkovsky, whose political ambitions are said to have troubled President Putin and led to his arrest.
There are a few clues. He knows Rupert Murdoch well, having been friends since the Australian newspaper proprietor first came to the UK in the 1960s. The job is clearly a challenge the 67-year-old finds irresistible, one made all the more fascinating simply because of all the fuss kicked up by investors furious at what they considered Murdoch,s blatant nepotism in pushing through his son,s appointment.
But as one friend said, Rothschild is likely to have considerable sympathy for the view that Murdoch is probably more ruthless and 'self-selecting' in his choice of heir than anyone else, having already knocked his older children, Elisabeth and Lachlan, out of the race. "Jacob is a very loyal man. Maybe he likes the idea that he can play elder statesman to the younger Murdoch while helping the father too. He will also be powerful in helping bring new fresh blood on to the board which needs reform. He,s not frightened of being a rebel," he said.
One of Rothschild's supporters was Allan Leighton, a BSkyB non-executive director since 1999 and the new chairman of its audit committee. He had suggested Rothschild to the headhunters Spencer Stuart as someone who was "confident, independently wealthy, and could add enormously to the board".
Meanwhile, Rothschild's links with Russia's Khodorkovsky, until recently head of the Yukos oil company, go back three to four years and stem from their shared love of the arts and philanthropy. Rothschild met Khodorkovsky through their patronage of the Hermitage Rooms at London's Somerset House but the two struck up friendship when the Russian businessman invited Rothschild to become a trustee of the Open Russia Foundation that he opened in London to promote educational and cultural ties between Russia and the West.
But the true extent of their relationship became muddied last week after reports that Khodorkovsky, who was jailed last week for fraud and tax evasion, had transferred his share stake in the event of arrest to Rothschild, who would act as a trustee. However, Menatap, the Gibraltar-based holding parent company of Yukos, has consistently denied that Rothschild had any rights or links to the shares or that he was a shareholder himself.
Menatep's Yury Kotler has said Rothschild had no involvement but that the shares were held in trust by Leonid Nevzlin, himself a big Yukos investor, now in exile in Israel. Rumours have been swirling in Russia for months that Rothschild might even become chairman of Yukos, but these have all been dismissed.
Rothschild's London office maintains a Soviet-style silence on the issue, refusing to make any comments on the share stake, other than to report that "Khodorkovsky is a progressive businessman who is devoted to Russia".
Nathaniel Charles Jacob Rothschild is the head of the UK Rothschild family, having inherited the fourth baronetcy from his father, Victor, an eminent zoologist, who married a Strachey, one of the Bloomsbury set. His father was a sometime MI5 agent, interested too in politics, having chaired Prime Minister Edward Heath,s Central Policy Review Staff in 1971, often known just as the Think Tank.
Rothschild was brought up in a conventional upper-class British way: Eton, and Christ Church, Oxford, where he gained a first in history. He worked for years at the family bank, running the corporate finance department, and was chairman of the executive committee before quitting suddenly in 1980 after the row with his cousin. The job of running the family bank had already passed to Sir Evelyn because Lord Rothschild's father had chosen science rather than banking as his career.
Like that slightly older generation of Jewish aesthetes, such as Sir Isaiah Berlin, whom he knew well, Lord Rothschild is extremely proud of his heritage and has worked passionately to strengthen ties with Israel.
He is chairman of Yad Hanadiv, the Rothschild foundation, which built and gave the Knesset government buildings and the Supreme Court to Israel, and chairs the Jewish Policy Research, dedicated to promoting issues affecting Jews worldwide.
At the same time he is equally energetic in the UK's art world and is a dynamic patron of a multitude of cultural projects. He caused a stir by spending some £10m on refurbishing Spencer House, the former home of the late Princess of Wales, family, in which he lives. As chairman of the National Gallery from 1985 to 1991, he oversaw the building of the Sainsbury wing and has just finished six years as chairman of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, during which he helped donate £1.25bn of National Lottery money for heritage works in the UK. On a more quixotic note, he has worked with Lord Sainsbury for the conservation of archeological sites in Butrint, Albania. He also looks after Waddesdon Manor, given to the National Trust by a cousin, Mrs James Rothschild, and is a director of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.
There aren't too many families like the Rothschilds that demonstrate so well the ability to pass on good genes. After all, they have been the power behind the throne of many a government since the family first arrived in Britain in the 1700s, emigrating from the Frankfurt ghettos.
Their first fortune was made out of the Napoleonic War, when they supplied the Duke of Wellington's soldiers fighting in the Peninsular War with gold for their wages. By the middle of the 19th century, they were spreading their wealth around Britain and France, investing in great properties and vineyards, while helping fund Disraeli's UK government to build the Suez Canal.
Rothschild's children have not joined the family firm. His son, Nat, works for Atticus Capital in New York while his three daughters have an eclectic mix of work and leisure out of the public eye. No wonder Murdoch wants a little advice from his old friend on how to really maintain an empire.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1089931,00.html
Michael Meacher
Friday November 21, 2003
The Guardian
David Kelly, giving evidence to the prime minister's intelligence and security committee in closed session on July 16 - the day before his suicide - made a comment the significance of which has so far been missed. He said: "Within the defence intelligence services I liaise with the Rockingham cell." Unfortunately nobody on the committee followed up this lead, which is a pity because the Rockingham reference may turn out to be very important indeed.
What is the role of the Rockingham cell? The evidence comes from a former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, Scott Ritter, who had been a US military intelligence officer for eight years and served on the staff of General Schwarzkopf, the US commander of allied forces in the first Gulf war. He has described himself as a card-carrying Republican who voted for Bush, but he distinguished himself in insisting before the Iraq war, and was almost alone in doing so, that almost all of Iraq's WMD had been destroyed as a result of inspections, and the rest either used or destroyed in the first Gulf war. In terms, therefore, of proven accuracy of judgment and weight of experience of the workings of western military intelligence, he is a highly reliable source.
In an interview in the Scottish Sunday Herald in June, Ritter said: "Operation Rockingham [a unit set up by defence intelligence staff within the MoD in 1991] cherry-picked intelligence. It received hard data, but had a preordained outcome in mind. It only put forward a small percentage of the facts when most were ambiguous or noted no WMD... It became part of an effort to maintain a public mindset that Iraq was not in compliance with the inspections. They had to sustain the allegation that Iraq had WMD [when] Unscom was showing the opposite."
Rockingham was, in fact, a clearing house for intelligence, but one with a predetermined political purpose. According to Ritter, "Britain and America were involved [in the 1990s and up to 2003] in a programme of joint exploitation of intelligence from Iraqi defectors. There were mountains of information coming from these defectors, and Rockingham staff were receiving it and then selectively culling [picking out] reports that sustained the [WMD] claims. They ignored the vast majority of the data which mitigated against such claims."
Only one other official reference to Operation Rockingham is on record, in an aside by Brigadier Richard Holmes when giving evidence to the defence select committee in 1998. He linked it to Unscom inspections, but it was clear that the Rockingham staff included military officers and intelligence services representatives together with civilian MoD personnel. Within, therefore, the UK intelligence establishment - MI6, MI5, GCHQ and defence intelligence - Rockingham clearly had a central, though covert, role in seeking to prove an active Iraqi WMD programme.
One of its tactics, which Ritter cites, is its leaking of false information to weapons inspectors, and then, when the search is fruitless, using that as "proof" of the weapons' existence. He quotes a case in 1993 when "Rockingham was the source of some very controversial information which led to inspections of a suspected ballistic missile site. We ... found nothing. However, our act of searching allowed the US and UK to say that the missiles existed."
A parallel exercise was set up by Donald Rumsfeld in the US, named the Office of Special Plans. The purpose of this intelligence agency was the provision of selective intelligence which met the demands of its political masters. Similarly, in the case of the UK, Ritter insists that Rockingham officers were acting on political orders "from the very highest levels".
Both Ritter and British intelligence sources have said that the selective intelligence gathered by Operation Rockingham would have been passed to the joint intelligence committee (JIC), which was behind the dossiers published by the UK government claiming Iraq had WMDs.
The significance of this is highlighted by Tony Blair's statement: "The intelligence that formed the basis of what we put out last September... came from the JIC assessment." So Rockingham was an important tributary flowing into the government's rationale for the war.
This shoehorning of intelligence data to fit pre-fixed political goals, both in the US and the UK, throws new light on the two most controversial elements of the government's dossier of September 2002. One was that Iraq could launch WMD within 45 minutes. Was this "sexed up" on the orders of No 10 or - derived allegedly from an Iraqi brigadier via an informant - did Rockingham put a gloss on it to please its political masters? The other highly contentious item in the dossier was that Saddam tried to buy uranium yellowcake from Africa. How did material that the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded on February 4 was a blatant forgery come to be included in President Bush's January 28 State of the Union address? And, since the British were named as the source, why did MI6 not spot this outlandish forgery? In fact, they alleged that the Niger claim came from another independent source, which has never been identified. Could this be because this disinformation served the Rockingham purpose only too well?
It is not only the massaging of intelligence that seems to have gone on, but also the suppression of the most reliable assessment of the facts. David Kelly, we now know, had been advising privately prior to the war about the likelihood of Iraqi WMD. He told the foreign affairs select committee: "I have no idea whether there were weapons or not at that time [of the September 2002 dossier]". And to the intelligence and security committee the next day he added: "The 30% probability is what I have been saying all the way through ... I said that to many people ... it was a statement I would have probably made for the last six months." Yet this view from the leading expert within government never saw the light of day. Why not?
If the tabloid headlines the day after the September dossier was published had read: "Blair says only 30% chance Iraq has WMDs" rather than "Brits 45 mins from doom" (the Sun), would the Commons vote still have backed the war? Rarely can the selective use of information have had such drastic consequences. If there is one conclusion which must flow from the Hutton revelations, it must surely be the demand for a full-scale independent inquiry into the operation of the intelligence services around the top of their command and their interface with the political system.
· Michael Meacher was environment minister, 1997-2003.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1089931,00.html
By by John Buchanan
from The New Hampshire Gazette Vol. 248, No. 1, October 10, 2003
By John Buchanan
http://www.nhgazette.com/cgi-bin/NHGstore.cgi?user_action=detail&catalogno=NN_Bush_Nazi_Link
WASHINGTON - After 60 years of inattention and even denial by the U.S. media, newly-uncovered government documents in The National Archives and Library of Congress reveal that Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, served as a business partner of and U.S. banking operative for the financial architect of the Nazi war machine from 1926 until 1942, when Congress took aggressive action against Bush and his "enemy national" partners.
The documents also show that Bush and his colleagues, according to reports from the U.S. Department of the Treasury and FBI, tried to conceal their financial alliance with German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, a steel and coal baron who, beginning in the mid-1920s, personally funded Adolf Hitler's rise to power by the subversion of democratic principle and German law.
Furthermore, the declassified records demonstrate that Bush and his associates, who included E. Roland Harriman, younger brother of American icon W. Averell Harriman, and George Herbert Walker, President Bush's maternal great-grandfather, continued their dealings with the German industrial baron for nearly eight months after the U.S. entered the war.
For six decades these historical facts have gone unreported by the mainstream U.S. media. The essential facts have appeared on the Internet and in relatively obscure books, but were dismissed by the media and Bush family as undocumented diatribes. This story has also escaped the attention of "official" Bush biographers, Presidential historians and publishers of U.S. history books covering World War II and its aftermath.
The White House did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.
The unraveling of the web of Bush-Harriman-Thyssen U.S. enterprises, all of which operated out of the same suite of offices at 39 Broadway under the supervision of Prescott Bush, began with a story that ran in the New York Herald-Tribune on July 30, 1942. By then, the U.S. had been at war with Germany for nearly eight months.
"Hitler's Angel Has $3 Million in U.S. Bank," declared the headline. The lead paragraph characterized Fritz Thyssen as "Adolf Hitler's original patron a decade ago." In fact, the steel and coal magnate had aggressively supported and funded Hitler since October 1923, according to Thyssen's autobiography, I Paid Hitler. In that book, Thyssen also acknowledges his direct personal relationships with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Hess.
The Herald-Tribune also cited unnamed sources who suggested Thyssen's U.S. "nest egg" in fact belonged to "Nazi bigwigs" including Goebbels, Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, or even Hitler himself.
The "bank," founded in 1924 by W. Averell Harriman on behalf of Thyssen and his Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V. of Holland, was Union Banking Corporation (UBC) of New York City. According to government documents, it was in reality a clearing house for a number of Thyssen- controlled enterprises and assets, including as many as a dozen individual businesses. UBC also bought and shipped overseas gold, steel, coal, and U.S. Treasury and war bonds. The company's activities were administered for Thyssen by a Netherlands-born, naturalized U.S. citizen named Cornelis Lievense, who served as president of UBC. Roland Harriman was chairman and Prescott Bush a managing director.
The Herald-Tribune article did not identify Bush or Harriman as executives of UBC, or Brown Brothers Harriman, in which they were partners, as UBC's private banker. A confidential FBI memo from that period suggested, without naming the Bush and Harriman families, that politically prominent individuals were about to come under official U.S. government scrutiny as Hitler's plunder of Europe continued unabated.
After the "Hitler's Angel" article was published Bush and Harriman made no attempts to divest themselves of the controversial Thyssen financial alliance, nor did they challenge the newspaper report that UBC was, in fact, a de facto Nazi front organization in the U.S.
Instead, the government documents show, Bush and his partners increased their subterfuge to try to conceal the true nature and ownership of their various businesses, particularly after the U.S. entered the war. The documents also disclose that Cornelis Lievense, Thyssen's personal appointee to oversee U.S. matters for his Rotterdam-based Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V., via UBC for nearly two decades, repeatedly denied to U.S. government investigators any knowledge of the ownership of the Netherlands bank or the role of Thyssen in it.
UBC's original group of business associates included George Herbert Walker, who had a relationship with the Harriman family that began in 1919. In 1922, Walker and W. Averell Harriman traveled to Berlin to set up the German branch of their banking and investment operations, which were largely based on critical war resources such as steel and coal.
The Walker-Harriman-created German industrial alliance also included partnership with another German titan who supported Hitler's rise, Friedrich Flick, who partnered with Thyssen in the German Steel Trust that forged the Nazi war machine. For his role in using slave labor and his own steel, coal and arms resources to build Hitler's war effort, Flick was convicted at the Nuremberg trials and sentenced to seven years in prison.
In 1926, after Prescott Bush had married Walker's daughter, Dorothy, Walker brought Bush in as a vice president of the private banking and investment firm of W.A. Harriman & Co., also located in New York. Bush became a partner in the firm that later became Brown Brothers Harriman and the largest private investment bank in the world. Eventually, Bush became a director of and stockholder in UBC.
However, the government documents note that Bush, Harriman, Lievense and the other UBC stockholders were in fact "nominees," or phantom shareholders, for Thyssen and his Holland bank, meaning that they acted at the direct behest of their German client.
On October 20, 1942, under authority of the Trading with the Enemy Act, the U.S. Congress seized UBC and liquidated its assets after the war. The seizure is confirmed by Vesting Order No. 248 in the U.S. Office of the Alien Property Custodian and signed by U.S. Alien Property Custodian Leo T. Crowley.
In August, under the same authority, Congress had seized the first of the Bush-Harriman-managed Thyssen entities, Hamburg-American Line, under Vesting Order No. 126, also signed by Crowley. Eight days after the seizure of UBC, Congress invoked the Trading with the Enemy Act again to take control of two more Bush-Harriman-Thyssen businesses - Holland-American Trading Corp. (Vesting Order No. 261) and Seamless Steel Equipment Corp (Vesting Order No. 259). In November, Congress seized the Nazi interests in Silesian- American Corporation, which allegedly profited from slave labor at Auschwitz via a partnership with I.G. Farben, Hitler's third major industrial patron and partner in the infrastructure of the Third Reich.
The documents from the Archives also show that the Bushes and Harrimans shipped valuable U.S. assets, including gold, coal, steel and U.S. Treasury and war bonds, to their foreign clients overseas as Hitler geared up for his 1939 invasion of Poland, the event that sparked World War II.
Following the Congressional seizures of UBC and the other four Bush- Harriman-Thyssen enterprises, The New York Times reported on December 16, 1944, in a brief story on page 25, that UBC had "received authority to change its principal place of business to 120 Broadway." The Times story did not report that UBC had been seized by the U.S. government or that the new address was the U.S. Office of the Alien Property Custodian. The story also neglected to mention that the other UBC-related businesses had also been seized by Congress.
Since then, the information has not appeared in any U.S. news coverage of any Bush political campaign, nor has it been included in any of the major Bush family biographies. It was, however, covered extensively in George H.W. Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin. Chaitkin's father served as an attorney in the 1940s for some of the victims of the Bush-Harriman-Thyssen businesses.
The book gave a detailed, accurate accounting of the Bush family's long Nazi affiliation, but no mainstream U.S. media entity reported on or even investigated the allegations, despite careful documentation by the authors. Major booksellers declined to distribute the book, which was dismissed by Bush supporters as biased and untrue. Its authors struggled even to be reviewed in reputable newspapers. That the book was published by a Lyndon LaRouche's organization undoubtedly made it easier to dismiss, but does not change the facts.
The essence of the story been posted for years on various Internet sites, including BuzzFlash.com and TakeBackTheMedia.com, but no online media seem to have independently confirmed it.
Likewise, the mainstream media have apparently made no attempt since World War II to either verify or disprove the allegations of Nazi collaboration against the Bush family. Instead, they have attempted to dismiss or discredit such Internet sites or "unauthorized" books without any journalistic inquiry or research into their veracity.
The National Review ran an essay on September 1 by their White House correspondent Byron York, entitled "Annals of Bush-Hating." It begins mockingly: "Are you aware of the murderous history of George W. Bush - indeed, of the entire Bush family? Are you aware of the president's Nazi sympathies? His crimes against humanity? And do you know, by the way, that George W. Bush is a certifiable moron?" York goes on to discredit the "Bush is a moron" IQ hoax, but fails to disprove the Nazi connection.
The more liberal Boston Globe ran a column September 29 by Reason magazine's Cathy Young in which she referred to "Bush-o-phobes on the Internet" who "repeat preposterous claims about the Bush family's alleged Nazi connections."
Newsweek Polska, the magazine's Polish edition, published a short piece on the "Bush Nazi past" in its March 5, 2003 edition. The item reported that "the Bush family reaped rewards from the forced-labor prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp," according to a copyrighted English-language translation from Scoop Media (www.scoop.co.nz). The story also reported the seizure of the various Bush-Harriman-Thyssen businesses.
Major U.S. media outlets, including ABC News, NBC News, The New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, Los Angeles Times and Miami Herald, have repeatedly declined to investigate the story when information regarding discovery of the documents was presented to them beginning Friday, August 29. Newsweek U.S. correspondent Michael Isikoff, famous for his reporting of big scoops during the Clinton-Lewinsky sexual affair of the 1990s, declined twice to accept an exclusive story based on the documents from the archives.
After the seizures of the various businesses they oversaw with Cornelis Lievense and his German partners, the U.S. government quietly settled with Bush, Harriman and others after the war. Bush and Harriman each received $1.5 million in cash as compensation for their seized business assets.
In 1952, Prescott Bush was elected to the U.S. Senate, with no press accounts about his well-concealed Nazi past. There is no record of any U.S. press coverage of the Bush-Nazi connection during any political campaigns conducted by George Herbert Walker Bush, Jeb Bush, or George W. Bush, with the exception of a brief mention in an unrelated story in the Sarasota Herald Tribune in November 2000 and a brief but inaccurate account in The Boston Globe in 2001.
John Buchanan is a journalist and investigative reporter with 33 years of experience in New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Miami. His work has appeared in more than 50 newspapers, magazines and books. He can be reached by e-mail at: jtwg@bellsouth.net.
http://www.nhgazette.com/cgi-bin/NHGstore.cgi?user_action=detail&catalogno=NN_Bush_Nazi_Link
By James Blitz in London and James Harding in Washington
Published: September 26 2003 20:26 | Last Updated: September 26 2003 20:26
Half the British public believe Tony Blair should resign, according to a new opinion poll illustrating the extent to which the UK prime minister has lost public trust as a result of the Iraq war.
In the week that has seen George W. Bush's popularity falling to the lowest level of his presidency, the slump in confidence in Mr Blair underlines how the invasion of Iraq has damaged the political prospects of the two leading advocates of war.
As Mr Blair heads to his party's annual conference this weekend where he is bound to face criticism over Iraq and his government's failure to deliver health reforms, public support appears to be shifting towards his presumed successor, Gordon Brown.
The Financial Times poll, conducted by Mori between September 11 and 16, shows that Labour continues to enjoy a nine-point lead over the opposition Conservatives in a sample of people certain to vote at the next general election, suggesting that, despite Mr Blair's troubles, he would be re-elected tomorrow.
But when the same voters are asked how they would vote if Mr Brown, finance minister, were Labour leader, the party's lead rises from nine points to 15 points.
Mr Bush has not faced the same levels of public disapproval. But in the last week opinion polls have shown a marked deterioration in US public support for the president. Both a Gallup/CNN poll and a Zogby poll put Mr Bush's approval rating at 50 per cent, the lowest since he took office. The NBC/Wall Street Journal measured his approval rating at 49 per cent.
On Iraq, in particular, Mr Bush is getting negative reviews. A Newsweek poll showed for the first time more Americans disapproving than approving of the president's handling of Iraq.
In the FT poll, people were asked whether t hey agreed with the statement that "it's now time for Tony Blair to resign and hand over to someone else". Fifty per cent said they agreed with that statement, 39 per cent said they disagreed and 11 per cent said they don't know. Some 64 per cent said they were dissatisfied with Mr Blair's performance, an all-time high. On Friday, the first US troops serving in Iraq to get a holiday as part of the Pentagon's largest home-leave programme since the Vietnam war arrived back on their home bases. Officials acknowledge there is a public relations risk of disgruntled US service personnel voicing their complaints on television.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/17/1543215
Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst.
David MacMichael, former CIA analyst.
AMY GOODMAN: A number of senators including New York Senator Charles Schumer, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Congress Member Harry Waxman and others have called for an investigation into who outed Joseph Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame as a CIA operative, who blew her cover. We called the White House to see if they were conducting an investigation. They said to call the FBI. We called the FBI. They said they’re looking into it but that they would not yet classify it as an investigation. Well today we turn to an interview that I did with two former CIA analysts to talk about just what it means for an analyst or agent to have their cover blown. While we had them in the studio, we talked about many other issues as well to shed some light on the way intelligence or lack of it has been used over the years. We began with former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who worked closely with George Bush senior when he was Director of Central Intelligence right through his presidency. And the law was passed under Bush’s watch that made the blowing of a covert operative a felony. We’re going to turn now to that interview.
Let’s go back in time to something former President Bush, this is George Bush senior, said. Langley, Virginia, he is at the Central Intelligence Agency – I’m reading from an Associated Press report:
“Former President Bush, helping the CIA celebrate its 50th birthday, called agency critics “nuts”. He singled out for criticism Philip Agee, a former CIA agent and later critic of the agency. “Remember Philip Agee, who I consider a traitor to our country?'' Bush asked, referring to Agee's efforts to expose CIA operations and identify spies. Bush said some of the criticism of the Directorate of Operations ruined secret U.S. clandestine operations in foreign countries and, in one instance, blew the cover of CIA station chief in Greece, Richard Welch, who was assassinated outside his residence in Greece in the mid-1970s. Bush was careful not to directly link Agee to Welch's death. Agee dropped a defamation suit against former first lady Barbara Bush earlier this year after Mrs. Bush acknowledged that the first edition of her memoir was erroneous in saying that Agee had exposed Welch's identity.'' David MacMichael, explain this.
DAVID MACMICHAEL: Well after the Mrs. Bush’s memoir came out with that statement which charged Phillip Agee effectively with commission of a felony, that is, violation of exposing this - exposing Richard Welch – ok, that’s a libel per se, as they say in law. Phillip Agee filed a suit some months after the book came out in Washington DC charging libel and seeking damages for that. He did not drop the suit. The case was dismissed by the presiding judge on grounds that Phillip’s place of residence at the time did not give him standing to sue in US courts on this, and the case went away. The subsequent, as I think the article indicates and you said, the subsequent additions of Mrs. Bush’s book did not contain this erroneous charge, but it serves to indicate that this is a very serious matter. If former President Bush could define Philip Agee as a traitor for exposing the identities of serving intelligence officers, if his son’s political advisor has done the same, while it has not come under the heading of treason, believe me, it is a very serious felony under the current Act.
AMY GOODMAN:Ray McGovern you worked for George Bush in the CIA when he was director of Central Intelligence. It was right at the time of the Richard Welch assassination. Were you at this 50th anniversary party?
RAY MCGOVERN: I was. They invited a whole bunch of alumni and alumnae back, so I was witness to those events. I would like to add that I do not condone what Phillip Agee did, nor does Dave. However, I think that ..
AMY GOODMAN: Though he says he did not expose Richard Welch as a CIA man.
RAY MCGOVERN: Well not Richard Welch, but he did expose many operations and many identities and that is really unconscionable. But what I would say is that the law came in, if I’m not mistaken, Dave, in direct reaction to what Agee had done. This was the Intelligence Identities law and it was made draconian, it was made very, very specific, automatic penalties that would accrue to both officials and non-officials - anyone who knowingly disclosed the identity of a CIA agent or officer under cover. And so with that kind of background, you get an idea of for how critical it was, it was judged to be, that agency operations which depend on concealed identities needed to be protected and needed to be protected in such a way that those violating those confidences would be prosecuted and extremely penalized.
What this indicates, I mean, this is all sort of in the weeds until you step back and you say why is all this happening? It is all happening because there are lies upon lies, deceit upon deceit that have been used to justify this illegal war on against an unprovoked enemy, or an enemy that does not provoke us. Once the lies start unraveling, and people see they can speak out, that is going to be real trouble for the administration, and so what do you do? You do all you can to intimidate them. And how you intimidate them is to try to hurt them in a personal way. Going after somebody’s wife, I mean, not even Richard Nixon stooped to that.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Ray McGovern and David MacMichael, two former CIA analysts with the agency for more than a quarter of a century. We’ll be right back with that in a minute.
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You are listening to Democracy Now! Ray McGovern, our guest, former CIA analyst. You were with the CIA for…
RAY MCGOVERN: 27 years.
AMY GOODMAN: And you worked directly under George Bush
RAY MCGOVERN: I did when he was director for CIA and later I saw him every other morning for a couple of years in the 80’s when he was Vice President.
AMY GOODMAN: Doing what?
RAY MCGOVERN: I was one of the briefers who prepared the President’s daily brief and delivered it and briefed people one on one with the senior officials downtown.
AMY GOODMAN:Now one of the things we are talking about a lot and seeing a lot is that the same people that were there during the Reagan-Bush years and even before, the Wolfowitzes the Rumsfelds, Cheneys were there then. What was George Bush’s view of these people then?
RAY MCGOVERN: Well, you know it’s really interesting. When we saw these people coming back in town, all of us said who were around in those days said, oh my god, ‘the crazies’ are back – ‘the crazies’ – that’s how we referred to these people.
AMY GOODMAN: Did George Bush refer to them that way?
RAY MCGOVERN: That’s the way everyone referred to them.
AMY GOODMAN: Including George Bush?
RAY MCGOVERN: Well, when Wolfowitz prepared that defense posture statement in 1991, where he elucidated the strategic vision that has now been implemented, Jim Baker, Secretary of State, Brent Scowcroft, security advisor to George Bush, and George Bush said hey, that thing goes right into the circular file. Suppress that thing, get rid of it. Somebody had the presence of mind to leak it and so that was suppressed. But now to see that arise out of the ashes and be implemented. while we start a war against Iraq, I wonder what Bush the first is really thinking. Because these were the same guys that all of us referred to as ‘the crazies’.
AMY GOODMAN: Including George Bush
RAY MCGOVERN: I don’t want to…There is a certain delicacy to all this. The last thing I want to do is to do anything to impede the access of honest analysts who are willing to speak truth to power on these mornings briefings, and so I am not going to quote anything the Vice President said to me directly.
AMY GOODMAN: But on that issue, when you say when Wolfowitz for example, brought forward the defense posture, explain what that was, what he was promoting.
RAY MCGOVERN: Well he was promoting the idea that has now been implemented that we are the single superpower in the world and that we should act like it. We’ve got a lot of weight to throw around, we should throw it around. We should assert ourselves in critical areas, like the Middle East and over the next few years the Project for New American Century documents very much elucidate this kind of strategic vision and strategic plan. It’s very much like Mein Kampf. It’s the ideological strategic justification for what has been happening here. It’s empire, it’s how to increase our influence and not coincidentally, it dovetail